Self-driving car software chief exits after six months

Self-driving car software chief exits after six months

Tesla’s self-driving car software team is getting a new boss after the latest person in the job lasted only about six months.

Chris Lattner, who had joined Tesla from Apple in January, confirmed late Tuesday that he has left the company.

“Turns out that Tesla isn’t a good fit for me after all,” Lattner said on Twitter. “I’m interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!”

The circumstances surrounding his exit were not immediately clear.

“Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change,” Tesla said in a statement.

The automaker’s propensity for cycling through leaders is well known in the industry.

The company’s Autopilot software can currently steer, brake and accelerate on the highway without human intervention. But CEO Elon Musk has outlined aggressive goals for the system, hoping to eventually making it a completely self-driving system.

Tesla hired former OpenAI research scientist Andrej Karpathy as director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot vision. The company said Jim Keller will oversee Autopilot hardware and software.